Ideal City employs instrumentallythe phenomenon of Nowa Huta (Poland), a town imagined and made concrete from above, as a holistic urbanistic and social experiment, aimed at outlining prospective scenarios for the evolution of the concept of city. This time developed at grass-roots level by the community laying down its rules.
The case of Nowa Huta is altogether exceptional because the experimental concept of the city created for the purposes of social engineering accumulates an infinite number of previous urban scenarios, universalising in this way the experience of city in the broad sense.
The experience of Nowa Huta’s unfinished utopia goes along with an equally multilayeredvisual archive. Although it only has two authors [Wiktor Pental (1920–2013) and Henryk Makarewicz (1917–1984)], their photographic practices occurred on diverse planes, thus representing a number of simultaneous policies on working with the image. As a consequence, the mutually complementary and discursive character of specific narratives or single images constituting the collection makes it a perfect instrumentarium to be used in the investigation process of what the city is today or may be in future.
Therefore, Ideal City juxtaposes two experiences: a city designed from scratch—a laboratory not only in urbanist and architectural but chiefly in social terms, and its representation. Apparently a coherent whole, it is still based on a number of a number of overlapping views: strictly documentary, humanistic, propagandist, private, more or less directly involved in the sphere of art, frequently constituting afterimages of concurrent visual trends. Deconstruction of such multilayered and equivocal collection of photographs dedicated to the city, a product of intersecting views from above, private convictions and synchronic aesthetic regimes, gives rise to a laboratory where prospective scenarios for how the concept of city may evolve are drawn, but this time from the grassroots perspective.
Ideal City is an open proposition, and merely a leaven for a broader progressing discourse. Bordering on a display or a publication at first, it provides a platform for further research offering a living repository for interested researchers/artists to delve into within the framework of the website/exhibition, and suggest new ways of interpretation.
Curator: Łukasz Trzciński
Authors: Agata Cukierska, Dorota Jędruch, Marta Karpińska, Dorota Leśniak-Rychlak, Szymon Maliborski, Ewa Rossal, Stanisław Ruksza, Katarzyna Trzeciak, Magdalena Ujma, Michał Wiśniewski
Supporting voices: Christophe Alix, Piotr Bujak, Łukasz Błażejewski, EBANO collective, Nina Fiocco, Tomasz Fudala, Marek Janczyk, Kacper Kępiński, Paweł Kruk, Yan Kurz, Piotr Lisowski, Lukáš Machalický, Krzysztof Maniak, Tomáš Moravec, Wojciech Nowicki, Jan Pfeiffer, Agnieszka Piksa&Vladimir Palibrk, Aleka Polis, Tomasz Rakowski, Dominik Stanisławski, Stach Szumski, Yan Tomaszewski, Matej Vakula, Jaro Varga, Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Paweł Wątroba, Rafał Woś, Julita Wójcik, Ewa Zarzycka
Production: Imago Mundi Foundation in partnership with The Museum of Photography in Kraków
Lenin Metallurgical Combine, inside the Zgniatacz Rolling Mill. The construction of the Zgniatacz Rolling Mill commenced as soon as 1953, first output was produced in 1955. Here carbon and low alloy steel ingots weighing between 8 and 15 tons were preliminarily processed into slabs or square blooms. Cast slabs are rolled at various thicknesses (100 to 200 mm), widths (550-1550 mm) and lengths (1250-1550 mm). Cold or hot ingots were transported from the steel plant by railway to the soaking pits hall, where they were heated to a temperature of about 1300˚C. The blooming mill (zgniatacz) was a duo reversible rolling mill. Each roller was driven by an individual electric engine. Hot blooms were sent directly to the billet rolling mill. Billets could then be moved directly to the finishing room or onto loading screens at the continuous steel strip rolling mill. 1960s.
Kombinat metalurgiczny im. Lenina, wnętrze hali Walcowni Zgniatacz. Wstępne prace przy budowie Walcowni Zgniatacz rozpoczęto już w 1953 roku, produkcja nastąpiła w 1955 roku. To walcownia wstępnego przerobu wlewków ze stali węglowej i niskostopowej o ciężarze od 8 do 15 ton na kęsiska płaskie lub kwadratowe. Odlewane kęsiska płaskie walcowane są w różnych grubościach (od 100 do 200 mm), szerokościach (od 550 do 1550 mm) oraz długościach (od 1250 do 1550 mm). Wlewki w stanie zimnym lub gorącym dostarczano ze stalowni trakcją kolejową do hali pieców wgłębnych. Piece te służyły do nagrzewania wlewków do temperatury ok. 1300 ℃. Zgniatacz był walcarką duo-nawrotną. Każdy walec posiadał napęd indywidualny za pomocą silników elektrycznych. Kęsiska ze zgniatacza kierowane były w stanie gorącym bezpośrednio do walcowni kęsów. Pozwalała ona kierować kęsy płaskie bezpośrednio do wykańczalni lub na kraty załadowcze walcowni ciągłej taśm, lata 60.
Photo by Henryk Makarewicz/idealcity.pl